February 13, 2009

Impress Me ...

Dear Lazy Web:

I've created a presentation for PyCon and I want to publish it as a PDF. Open Office seems like the best bet (yes, I created in it PowerPoint, but I did have my reasons, honest).

Unfortunately I can't seem to find a way to get Impress to produce a PDF containing only the notes pages (each slide with its notes underneath); it insists on putting all the slides in before it starts on the notes pages. This is probably just some UI aspect that I am unfamiliar with and can't find. But it would be really nice to know how to do this.

13 comments:

I'm using openoffice.org version 3.0.1 on Mac OS X but I think this should work in all versions.

First, you select File > Printer Settings ...Then a popup appears and you press buttoan labeled Options ....In there you select Notes and deselect Drawing.Finally, you print to your PDF printer and you get the slides with the notes below.

Another possibility (also tested on a Mac):Tools > Options > openoffice.org Impress (to expand the node in the tree on the left) > Print (and then select notes in the contents section).I think this selects default options for all the presentations but it can be a way to solve your problem.

Don't know how to get to it in the Windoze version of OpenOffice, but what you're looking for is called Handouts on my OpenOffice on the Mac. So maybe if you search for handouts in the help it'll let you know how to do that on windoze.

Thanks, Anna. We are separated by the curse of terminological disagreement. Unfortunately "handouts" aren't what I am looking for - they are the (typically six-up) slide-only sheets. The "Notes" pages print one slide per sheet, with the bottom half containing the printed notes I wrote in PowerPoint.

Intermediate Python

About Me

A director of the Python Software Foundation for eight years and its chairman for three, Steve wrote Python Web Programming, authored the O'Reilly School's Certificate Series in Python, and O'Reilly's Intermediate Python video series.
He teaches, helps clients to design and build information systems, runs events and small conferences for technical audiences, and is slowly learning to be a grandfather.
He's also planning to spend a lot more time in the UK from now on, but happy that he will still get to spend maybe a quarter of the year in the States
Past answers to random questions:
Unlike a dog, how can a turtle ever be naked? It might have executed a shell escape ...